I use the SH-4 on a few of my guitars with 500k pots and yes it does tend to be trebly especially on my alder bodied M-2 not so much on the basswood guitar. so it totally depends on the kind of guitar you're going to be dropping the pick up in. IMO if im usinga strat like guitar i'll use the 250k pots but if i have a mahogany guitar like my ec-1000 that used to have a jb in it i'll actually use the 500k. You can always roll back on the tone knob on your guitar if it gets too trebly and just tweaking your amp settings should be enough to get rid of that treble. The CTS pots are good quality pots but i haven't tried the 250k CTS only the 500k and im pretty happy with them.

I've been reading around and it seems that 250k is what's preferred with the SH-4. Plus I don't really like things too trebly so it sounds like a good option for me.

The pot is fine.

I've got JB SH-4's and definitely don't recommend a 250K pot for them (if there's too much treble, understand that the pot you're discussing is, after all, a treble rolloff pot. Just roll it back. There's also EQ on your amp, after all.

I was in a hurry a couple of years ago and was swapping out a pair of cheap Duncan Design hot rails lookalikes for a set of real Hot Rails. I handed the guitar to a Guitar Center tech and asked him to put in a push-pull pot that would allow me to coil split the hot rails (the bridge humbucker was already taken care of). So here we have a super strat with all humbuckers and the goof puts in a 250K pot. I got home, played it for a week and just hated those pickups. I opened the back, saw the 250K pot, rolled my eyes and took the guitar back. There he was, grinning, "You had a 500K pot in there, but I fixed it for ya. You LIKE the darker sound, doncha?"

"Bonk!"

Once we got that sorted out, the guitar (and the pickups) sounded SO much better.

Here's an EVH clue. Put a GE7 (7-band EQ pedal) or an MXR M108 (10-band EQ) on your pedal board right after the guitar and before anything else. Use it to EQ Your Pickups. Simply amazing what you can do with a fairly full-range set of pickups. I had a guy come over to the house who walked in the door grumping that he was going to spend some stupid money on Railhammer this or Nailbomb that. We sat down, listened to his pickups for a few seconds, and I tweaked the MXR a bit and he's all lit up. He thinks it's my amp. Suddenly he's not spending $250 for pickups, he's looking at $1000 for a new amp. So I ripped the MXR off the board and we went back to his house. We tweaked there, and now he's unhappy again; everything sounds good and he doesn't need an amp OR a set of pickups and now he has money burning a hole in his pocket and he doesn't know what to do with it.

SD designed the JB to be used with 250k pots, but it was also made for unusual Telecasters and was meant to be a blues-toned pickup with more output to drive an amp harder into basic, light distortion. Most people who get JBs these days think if them as higher-power pickups for dark-toned guitars to play hard rock and metal with; very different to how they were designed.

So think about the natural tone of your guitar and the sort of response you want to end up with, then pick what sort of pot value to use. Very bright guitars probably will benefit from using 250k pots as the JB can be such a shrill pickup. Darker guitars will—for most people, but not all—be best off with 500k pots. Bear in mind you can mix pot values up or leave pots out, to tweak the sound to your liking. Gibson's standard pot layout for humbuckers and P-90s, for example, is one 300k pot (linear, volume) and one 500k pot (linear or audio taper, tone). One 250k pot (e.g. volume only) effects the sound about as much as having two 500k pots (e.g. volume and tone). By mixing 250k, 300k, 500k and 1meg, you can have the high-end exactly as you want it.

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SD designed the JB to be used with 250k pots, but it was also made for unusual Telecasters and was meant to be a blues-toned pickup with more output to drive an amp harder into basic, light distortion. Most people who get JBs these days think if them as higher-power pickups for dark-toned guitars to play hard rock and metal with; very different to how they were designed.

So think about the natural tone of your guitar and the sort of response you want to end up with, then pick what sort of pot value to use. Very bright guitars probably will benefit from using 250k pots as the JB can be such a shrill pickup. Darker guitars will—for most people, but not all—be best off with 500k pots. Bear in mind you can mix pot values up or leave pots out, to tweak the sound to your liking. Gibson's standard pot layout for humbuckers and P-90s, for example, is one 300k pot (linear, volume) and one 500k pot (linear or audio taper, tone). One 250k pot (e.g. volume only) effects the sound about as much as having two 500k pots (e.g. volume and tone). By mixing 250k, 300k, 500k and 1meg, you can have the high-end exactly as you want it.

Thanks for all the info man. So I'd be dropping the JB into a MIM strat. I'm only going to be running one humbucker in the bridge position and a volume knob (just a little project guitar i got going). I play out of a mesa dual rec and im always turning down the treble on that thing as it is, i like a beefy controlled distortion, so I should probly go with a 250k pot. What do you think? Also, since my simple setup will consist of only a humbucker and volume knob, what specific volume pot do you suggest?

When you only use one volume knob you would usually use a 250k pot at least, so the tone is about the same as having two 500k controls (tone control left at full treble). In the 80s it was quite popular to use a single 500k or even 1meg control, but people were also making guitars out of nothing but maple then and having a really, really bright, piercing tone was what everyone was after. If you find you've already got quite a bright sound and you want to reduce your controls whilst not adding any more treble, start with a 250k control but be prepared to go to a 150k pot.

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